September 27, 2007

There's just one more thing to mention: creating your own custom sort order.

Existing sort orders are things like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (the right order, which is not alphabetical). But let's say you've got things you want in a certain logical but non-alphabetical order that aren't already set up in OpenOffice.org: titles of books or people, procedures done in a certain order, or your own abbreviations for the days of the week. You can create sort orders for those very easily so you can sort by them.

Let's say you've got this data.

This is the right order. If you had them out of order, though, and wanted to sort them, all you'd have the option for is alphabetic. Which isn't right. So you create an order to sort them by.

Select just the content of the sort order, nothing else. Be sure it's in the order you want it.

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org Calc > Sort Lists.

Now just click Copy.

The list will appear. Click OK.

Now just sort the way you would with a custom sort order. You'll see your new sort order in the sort window.

Sort orders are nice for quick data entry, too. If you type the first word for a sort order, then find the small black handle in the lower right corner of the cell and drag, you'll be able to easily fill the cells with the rest of the content in the sort order.

Type the first word

Find the black handle and drag (magnified to show the handle)

The data will fill in each cell you drag through, in the order set up in the sort list.

September 26, 2007

I found this extremely funny. Perhaps an accurate if not inspiring slogan for the UK would be "Extremely funny in a bitter, witty way about our idiosyncracies, and many of us still remember our Latin."

September 24, 2007

Let's say you have a schedule and you want to sort it by day of the week. What's the first day of the week? Monday. But alphabetically it's not first. Friday, for instance, comes before Monday. So here's how to sort by days of the week, months, etc.

You've got your data.

Select it and choose Data > Sort.

Click the Options tab and make the appropriate selection for Range Contains Column Labels.

Now select Custom Sort Order and select the one you want.

Click the Sort Criteria tab and select the column to sort by that contains the corresponding kind of data.

Click OK.

And you get your results.

Wondering "Where did that sort order come from?"

Wondering "Could I perhaps make my own sort order, like President Vice-President Secretary Treasurer or High Card, Pair, Two Pair, Trips, and so on?"

You will have your questios answered in the next installment of Sorting.

September 19, 2007

You want to do some good, hard sorting. Not just sorting by the first column, but by perhaps the third column. Maybe you want to sort first by state, then by city, then by last name. For that, you need the Sort window under Data > Sort.

You have your data. Select all the data to sort, and either select the headings or not. You're good either way.

Now click the Sort Criteria tab. If you selected headings you'll see the headings themselves; if you didn't then you'll just see Column A, etc. Select the column to sort by, and Ascending or Descending.

Click OK.

You get your results. Here, the amounts under the column for the year 2000 are sorted in ascending order.

Now, let's look at a different set of data. You have a lot of people from the same state, and several cities per state. In this case you might want to just sort by last name, but you could also group by location. So you'd sort by state (the broadest category), then city, then alphabetically by last name. Click the image to see more detail.

Select the data, with or without headings, and choose Data > Sort. In the Options tab, be sure to select the Range Contains Column Labels option if you selected headings.

In the Sort Criteria tab, select first State, then City, then Last Name.

Click OK.

You get your results. Here's a closeup of one section, followed by the complete data. Click either to see them closeup.

This window that I've covered in this blog entry is pretty much what you need. If you want to go a little farther and sort by something else, like days of the week in the order they come, not alphabetical order, tune in for the next sorting blog.

"After years of watching Microsoft rake in billions of dollars from its desktop software franchise, its competitors are pouncing.

IBM on Tuesday announced the release of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free desktop applications based on the OpenOffice.org open-source product...." and so on.

Now, this article is about seven years too late since Sun had StarOffice out there a while ago. But Sun didn't....really....go gangbusters marketing StarOffice. There were the tshirts and bus ads, yes, a year or so ago, but not much else that I saw.

Let's hope the publicity, and recognition of OpenOffice.org and its variants, continues!

In the mood of fall cleaning and to celebrate having gotten my office organized, I'm going to blog this week about sorting. Today, it's just basic run-of-the-mill sorting using the sorting icons on the toolbar.

Let's say you've just got this list, and you want to sort it alphabetically.

Select it, without selecting any data you don't want sorted.

Click either the A-Z or Z-A icon.

You get your results.

Be sure not to select any headings, i.e. the word Employee in this case, or you get this result, which you don't want.

What if you have something like this, though? Something with multiple columns.

Here's the thing. Selecting, say, the 2000 column and clicking a sort icon will NOT give you good results. It will sort just the data in the 2000 column and leave all the other data behind. So all of a sudden your data is wrong.

You cannot specify the column to sort by, using the simple sort icons. That's covered in my next blog entry on sorting.

Here's what you can do. You can sort by the first column in the data set. You select ALL the data, again without the headings.

You click the sort icon you want.

And you get your results; the data is sorted by the first column. That's your only choice.

September 14, 2007

The first
K-12 Open Minds conference is
going to be held October 9 - 11, 2007, in Indianapolis, Indiana. The
kick-off reception is Tuesday, the 9th, with the regular conference
sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, the 10th & 11th.

The Open Minds Conference is the first national K-12 gathering for
teachers, technicians and educational leaders to share and explore the
benefits of open source in education. Virtual Learning Environments
that provide 24X7 access to teaching and learning resources,
cutting-edge and easy-to-use desktop applications, coupled with
powerful management tools and low-cost computer strategies make the
classroom of tomorrow available today!

Schools around the United States and the world are discovering the the
benefits of open source software. In Indiana alone, over 100,000
students use open source software every day. Not only does open source
save money, it allows schools to extend the benefits of technology more
broadly, affording a better education to students.

The individual registration fee is $100, or $89 each for groups of three or more. Register on the
website or call Anthony Yanez, Registration Coordinator, at 800.940.6039, extension 1348. Compared to other conferences I've been to, this is a huge bargain.

This is a great opportunity to really find out how much you can benefit, and how much money you can save, by using open source software. And of course to learn enormous amounts about using the software.

The book is by Dave Richards, IT guy at the city of Largo, Florida, who also has this blog.

Now, I haven't read the book. I just found out this morning it had been released. But I've been working with Dave intermittantly for a couple years. He makes 10-year-old machines run like they just came out of the box, and is always reading up on and implementing new tools and techniques in a very intelligent way. So I'll bet that virtually anyone on the planet doing Linux networks can learn something extremely useful from Dave's book.

One of the nice things about Microsoft products is that they have a lot of prefab goodies. OpenOffice.org is a little more of a from-scratch situation. But you have much more flexibility, and you can still do a lot of great stuff. It's not easy, at least not using this approach, to add borders all around, but you can do it in the top and bottom.Step 1: Add graphics to the gallery.You can find lots of great graphics on the Internet by googling for "free clip art." For the purposes of borders, keep an eye out for graphics that are small, i.e. under an inch by an inch, and also that have some white space around them.

You now have headers and footers. The graphics will repeat in the background of each to create the graphical border.

Next, turn on the Gallery by choosing Tools > Gallery or clicking the Gallery icon.

Find a category you like, then find a graphic you want to use. Drag the graphic into the document to see how big it is, if you don't know. This one, for instance, is too big. To delete it, just select it so that the green handles are showing, in the document, and press Delete on your keyboard. You can also press Ctrl Z or use the Undo icon.

This one is better. It's a good size, plus there's some white space around the graphic so that when it tiles, you won't see part of another row of the graphic.

Delete the graphic from the document once you know which one you're going to use.

Click in the header.

Right-click on the graphic, in the gallery, and choose Insert > Background > Header.

The graphic will appear, repeating, but not all of it will show at first.

Click in the header and press Return once or more times to add more space, to show the entire graphic.

If part of the graphic is showing on the right side, click in the header and move your mouse over the ruler, at the edge of the right margin. When your mouse becomes a 2-ended arrow, click and hold down, and drag to the left or right to show the amount of graphic you want.

Then only whole graphics will show.

Then click in the footer, and do the same thing. Insert the same graphic, or another graphic if you want, in the background of the footer, then adjust it as necessary the same way you adjusted the header.

September 11, 2007

IBM's participation could make OpenOffice.org a more serious threat to
Microsoft's stranglehold on the productivity software market.

Here's what I think. Benefits:- Money- Connections to a zillion enterprises across the world- Money- Name recognition among end users, which Sun doesn't have- Money- It's entirely possible they'll be throwing some marketing dollars behind OpenOffice.org

But here's something else. People who hear of OpenOffice.org think "Why is it free?" "What's open source?" "What's up with this craaaaazy communist kind of software development?" My point is, there's nervousness surrounding something that's free and open source and not Controlled. (Anyone with experience with normal controlled software projects knows that's no guarantee of success, a good product, releasing on time, releasing at all, etc., but that's a separate issue.)

IBM has such a buttoned-down, conservative, reliable, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" image that that might be the single biggest advantage about IBM's participation.

As the old Klingon saying goes, "Only Nixon could go to China." Perhaps only IBM could get OpenOffice.org on 51% of desktops.